Sign of the Covenant Part 2

This week, we are in some of the biggest and most important chapters within the book of Genesis, within the life of Israel, and within the life of a Christian.

One night, in the beginning of , a Pharisee came to Jesus.

His name was Nicodemus.

He was a ruler of the Jews.

He was a part of the Sanhedrin, the ruling body of the Jews.

He was a very important man.

He came to Jesus at night because he didn’t want to bring too much pressure upon himself.

An important man like him, couldn’t be seen talking to someone as dangerous as Jesus.

Jesus could be bad for his reputation.

Still, his curiosity demanded that he have a chat.

He wanted to find out exactly who Jesus was.

He approached Jesus, and laid it all on the line.

(ESV) , “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”

Jesus then responded with these important words, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus is a little perplexed.

What is Jesus talking about?

“You must be born again?”

Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

“How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

Jesus then reiterates what He said the first time, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”

What does it mean to be born again?

Today, that phrase is thrown around to describe Christians, but not all Christians, only some Christians.

The born again Christians, are the hardcore Christians.

They are the ones who are really serious about their faith.

Sometimes they are seen as a political force.

Politicians try to capture the born again vote.

This isn’t what it means to be born again.

And until we know what it means to be born again, we’ll never know why it’s so important to be born again.

Jesus said, “unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

That sounds like it’s pretty important.

Let’s see why.

We are continuing in .

Open your Bibles to

Read Genesis 17:9-14

This text begins with a Call to Action.

This lays out what God expects of mankind.

Remember, our initial question is why does man need to be born again, and how this text explains that to us.

Back at the beginning of chapter 17, God told Abraham, “I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless,”

And here in verse 9, God says, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations.”

This is the call to action.

This is what God expects.

God commands and expects us to be blameless, to be perfect.

In , Jesus said something similar, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

This is what God expects of mankind, absolute perfection.

The reality of all this is that none of us are perfect.

We have all broken what God has commanded us to do.

Any time we break God’s law, it’s called sin.

The truly heart breaking thing about sin, is that everyone sins.

It’s easy to point to the really bad person and say, he has sinned.

It’s easy to point to the person that is so wicked, that he looks nothing like us, and say he is a sinner.

Isn’t it funny how whenever we need an example of a sinner, we never talk about your grandma, or your mom, or even yourself?

Who do we talk about?

Hitler.

Stalin.

Charles Manson.

Yea, cause these are your average sinners.

Why don’t we use more common examples?

Because if we used more “normal” people, it’d be too convicting, and we’d sound judgmental.

One of my favorite responsibilities as a pastor is doing funerals.

I’m not looking to do any right now, I’m just saying, it’s an honor to oversee the funeral of a beloved saint who has died.

When I do a funeral for someone I don’t know, or for someone that I never knew if they were a Christian, I do it differently, then if I were to preach at the funeral for someone I knew closely.

If I don’t know the person, I’ll preach the Gospel, but it’s not going to be as personal as if it was for someone that I knew closely.

Because I don’t know the person, I’m not going to be able to share as many stories, I don’t have the persons face in my head, because I never knew him.

Often times the family claims the person was a Christian, actually, almost every time family says the person is in heaven.

Yet, the person was a stranger to church, there was never any evidence of conversion.

So, rather then give anyone a false assurance;

I preach the Gospel, sidestepping the question of if the person is in heaven or not.

But if I knew the person, well that’s different.

It’s much more intimate and personal.

A few times, I’ve even been able to plan the service with the individual before they died and go over what I’m going to say.

I remember, one time preaching the message at a funeral for someone that I loved.

And in the process of preaching the Gospel, I came to sin.

It was an older woman who had died.

I knew the person.

I was able to plan her service with her before she died.

I explained what her hope was.

I explained that her hope wasn’t in herself, because she was a sinner.

Her sin, disqualified her from going to heaven, which is why she was a Christian.

I went on to explain that in her sin, she deserved Hell.

Because she needed Christ to save her.

But because of Christ’s death, she is with the Lord, and what wonderful news that is!

Later on in the service, her granddaughter came up to say a few words, and she clearly wasn’t happy with what I said.

Her first words were, “My grandma was not a sinner.”

You see, it’s easy to say Hitler is a sinner, but not as easy to say your grandma is a sinner.

But the reality is that we have all sinned.

We all may not have sinned like the mass murderer, or the evil dictator, but that doesn’t mean we are innocent.

We deflect guilt, but comparing ourselves to the really bad guy.

There’s this guy that Karen and I know, who’s a huge Yankees fan.

As the baseball playoffs approached, he was telling us how the Yankees were going to win the World Series.

He really trash talks well.

Makes fun of everyone.

You probably know someone like this.

Well, a couple weeks ago, the Yankees were knocked out of the playoffs.

They not only wouldn’t win the World Series, they didn’t even go to the World Series.

They aren’t even going to the World Series.

So he comes in and some of the first words out of his mouth are, “Well they’re better than the Padres.”

I’m a Padres fan.

He was deflecting the loss, deflecting the reality that his team is out, by comparing it to a team that isn’t good.

But the reality is neither of our teams are going to the World Series this year.

He feels better about himself, by comparing his team to a worse team.

And we do that with sin.

We compare ourselves to others thinking that we aren’t as bad as we are.

God knows we are sinners, which brings us to our Action

We’ve talked about some of Abraham’s mistakes, his sins.

God is well aware of Abraham’s sins.

Abraham’s sins do not make God’s covenant void though.

God is aware of Abraham’s sin, God reminds Abraham of His covenant, and then says this in , “This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised.”

So even though God knows of Abraham’s sin, God continues to have a covenant with Abraham.

God is not removing Himself from Abraham’s life.

God is faithful to His promise.

Instead, He tells Abraham, that he and every male with him needs to be circumcised.

At first glance things don’t really add up.

Abraham’s sinned.

God makes a promise.

God says be circumcised.

What God is saying is, “You have sinned, and I’m calling for you to walk before me and be blameless.”

Basically, this is repentance.

This is, “Stop what you’ve done and been doing, and obey me.”

And a demonstration that Abraham understood what God was calling for, was that he be circumcised.

Verse 11 calls the circumcision a sign of the covenant.

It was Abraham’s way of saying, he understood what God was calling for.

Circumcision was never supposed to be just a simple surgery done to young boys.

It was supposed to be a sign.

It was supposed to be a statement that you understood what God was calling for.

God was calling for repentance.

But this was no simple change of mind.

It was supposed to be a radical change within the individual.

As radical as the act of circumcision itself.

In circumcision, a piece of skin is cut away.

And it’s supposed to be a picture, of what our repentance is.

Sin should be that sin is cut out of our life.

So when a person was circumcised, it was a picture, that sin had been cut away.

God was calling for radical repentance.

And this was not optional.

In God says, “Circumcise yourselves to the Lord; remove the foreskin of your hearts, O men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem; lest my wrath go forth like fire, and burn with none to quench it, because of the evil of your deeds.”

Circumcision was never supposed to be a simple act.

It was always supposed to be a picture of a man’s heart, being turned from wickedness.

God demands that a man’s heart be made pure, so that he can pursue God completely.

God calls for us to repent.

God calls for us to obey Him.

If you’ve ever wondered what God wants you to do, there you go.

(ESV) — 16 Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no longer stubborn.

And so as we preach, we preach for people to turn to the Lord.

Like Peter on Pentecost, we tell people to repent and believe.

That’s what we call people to do.

Unfortunately, there were weaknesses in circumcision.

Circumcision, was supposed to be a demonstration of the human heart changing.

We were called to circumcise our heart.

Which we can’t do.

We can’t change our heart.

That’s like a heart surgeon doing heart surgery on himself.

He can’t do it.

The reality of the human condition, is that the stain of sin is so firm upon our nature, that we cannot change it on our own.

says, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil.”

It’s who we are.

God commands us to repent, but yet, our hold to sin is so strong, that we will not release it on our own.

In many ways, circumcision, which was supposed to be a picture of our commitment to pursuing God, in reality, it became a picture of our failure to obey God.

Additionally, one of the weaknesses of circumcision, was that only males could be circumcised.

And yet, God is making a kingdom of men and women.

says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

So God tells us to circumcise our heart, and yet there is this inability for us to do that.

That doesn’t mean we throw up our hands in defeat.

It doesn’t mean we respond like the world around us and say it’s who I am so deal with it.

Rather, there is great news.

And the good news, is that God circumcises our heart.

The very thing that we couldn’t do, He does for us.

Think about the language of what we’ve heard this morning.

God says circumcise your heart.

We don’t.

Then listen to these words from , “And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.”

Did you catch that?

It says, “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart”!

The very thing that God commands for us to do, He ends up doing for us.

What is the product of having a circumcised heart?

He enables us to love Him with all our heart, and soul.

What God does is more than just circumcise our heart, He gives us a whole new heart.

says, “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”

That’s heart surgery.

God says circumcise your heart - I cant.

God does it for us.

God says our heart is deceitful above all things, it needs changed - I cant.

God changes it for us.

So going back to how we started this whole sermon, I talked about Nicodemus coming to Jesus.

Jesus said you must be born again.

And those words went right over Nicodemus’ head.

He didn’t even understand them.

He’s a part of the ruling body of Jews.

Jesus found it strange that Nicodemus didn’t know what He meant.

Jesus said, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?”

You know why Jesus wondered how Nicodemus could be a teacher of Israel and not get the point of what He was talking about?

Because the concept of being born again is what we’ve been describing this morning.

And we’ve only been using the Old Testament, which is what Nicodemus had.

Nicodemus should have known all this.

Nicodemus should have known that our hearts need to be changed.

Nicodemus should have known that we need to receive a new heart.

Yet, it was brand new to him.

He was a teacher, and yet, he didn’t know the good news from the Old Testament.

The Good News, is that though we are sinners, God changes our hearts, puts His Spirit within us.

In the Old Testament, proof that you were in the covenant was circumcision.

In the New Covenant, proof that you are in the covenant is not circumcision, and sorry to my Presbyterian friends, it’s not baptism either.

In fact, it’s not anything that we can do to ourselves like that.

(ESV) — 11 In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ,

That means the circumcision that we have received is not done to our body by another human.

But by God.

And this is sometimes a hard concept to grasp.

I remember one time having an individual in my office and he was talking to me about my conversion.

I told him that I didn’t become a Christian until my 20’s.

And he began to argue with me.

He said no, I was a Christian, I was converted when I was younger, when I was baptized.

And I had to argue with him.

On one hand I laugh, because either way, I’m a Christian now, and that should be good, we both should be happy.

At one time, I was a false convert, but now I’m really a Christian.

But he was saying I always was a Christian, because he was looking at something done to me by human hands.

When the promise is that true conversion, happens not by human hands, but by God.

The Sign of the Covenant that our hearts have been changed and we have is the Holy Spirit.

The proof of your conversion is that the Holy Spirit dwells within the life of a believer.

(ESV) — 13 In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit,

(ESV) — 22 and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.

(ESV) — 13 In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit,

And the evidence of Him living within you is that you now love God, love to obey God and love to serve God.

Think about how this all fits into evangelism?

We are to evangelize.

We tell people to repent.

We tell people to trust in God.

And we do our very best.

We give reasons.

We give evidence.

We quote Scripture.

We plead with people.

And at the same time, we know that this is all a work of God.

So we pray.

We pray that people would be converted.

This is why you pray for your mom to be saved, or your brother to be saved.

This is why we have a prayer team, who prays while we go out for Gospel to the Valley.

Because we know that though we are to call people to salvation, conversion, is ultimately a work of God.

Where He does, what we cannot do ourselves.

God takes that hard heart, does surgery on it, circumcises it, removes it, and gives the person a new heart that loves God.

So, evangelize, but also, pray that the Lord would change hearts.

Your New Action

But being born again, doesn’t mean, you sit on your behind and bask in your new status with God.

If you’ve received a new heart from God, and a new nature, then we are to align our heart with God’s, and do what is pleasing to Him.

How do we do that?

First, if your desires change, then we are to put sin far behind us.

It’s not fitting for you.

If you’ve received a new heart, you have a new nature.

So why go back to it.

It’s not becoming of you.

It’s like watching a person who has had a tracheostomy smoke.

You know when they have had cancer, and they a hole in their neck.

Then they smoke through that hole in their neck.

You want to grab the person by the shoulders and say, “knock it off!”

So put sin far behind, demonstrating the change that has happened within you.

Second, pursue ministry that is pleasing to Him.

I’m going to be emphasizing this a lot, especially early next year.

If you’ve been born again:

You have peace with God.

You have the Holy Spirit within you.

He has gifted you, now use that gift to His glory.

Just as He has circumcised your heart, He is manipulating you like a potter shapes clay.

He’s shaping you into what He wants.

, says you are His workmanship.

So, demonstrate that you have been born again, that you are His workmanship, by repenting of sin and serving Him.

If this has never happened to you.

I am describing a change that never occurred in your life.

Then cry out to God.

He’s a kind God. And He will save you.

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